The Clutter Corpse

by Simon Brett

  ‘I haven’t had a chance to look at the papers yet.’ I turned to Hilary. ‘Anything in them we don’t already know?’

  ‘No, just speculation.’

  ‘Oh well, I’ll catch up with The Observer when I get home,’ I said.

  Philip smiled. ‘Still a bit of a leftie, are you? Guardian during the week, is it?’

  I admitted that it was. ‘Mind you, when we first met, you were full of Socialist principles too, weren’t you?’

  He grinned rather wolfishly. ‘Maybe. Difficult to maintain those once you start making serious money, I’m afraid. When you don’t possess anything, it doesn’t matter, you can be as left-wing as you like. When you’ve got something to conserve … well, there’s a clue in the word.’

  I grinned too, in a way that I hoped would close the subject. I hadn’t got the energy to get involved in political argument. Because I would very quickly move on to cuts in funding for mental health services and that would just make me cross.

  Fortunately, that possibility was prevented by the emergence of a young man from the cottage.

  ‘Oh, hi,’ said Hilary. ‘Liam, this is my friend Ellen.’

  ‘Hi, good to meet you.’ He was long and thin, dressed in a grey T-shirt and worn black jeans. Broad-chested; must’ve worked out in a gym somewhere. Would have been good looking but for a slight imbalance of his features. One of those over-sculpted beards which are so popular with young men.

  ‘Liam’s helping me out, kind of work experience,’ Hilary explained. ‘Going to do a criminology degree.’

  The way he looked at her made me suspect that here was yet another of her love-struck young men. If that was the case, it didn’t seem to worry Philip. Mind you, none of the previous ones had worried him. He felt secure in his ownership of a beautiful woman. The fact that other men fancied her was, for him, a kind of validation.

  ‘Like a beer, Liam?’ he asked.

  ‘That’d be great. Thank you.’

  ‘Criminology?’ I echoed, as Philip went in to get the drink.

  ‘Well, that’s the long-term plan,’ he said.

  ‘Liam’s studying law at Nottingham,’ Hilary explained.

  ‘Oh, which university?’

  ‘Sorry?’ he asked.

  ‘My son’s at Nottingham Trent.’

  ‘Ah. I’m at the other one.’

  ‘Wondered if you might by any chance have met.’

  ‘What’s he studying?’

  ‘Graphic design.’

  ‘Unlikely then. There are a lot of students round Nottingham, doing all kinds of courses.’ He didn’t quite make it sound patronizing.

  ‘Of course. Well, if you ever do meet up, he’s called Ben Curtis. And what’s your surname?’

  ‘Burgess. Liam Burgess.’

  ‘I’ll tell him I met you.’

  ‘Fine.’

  Philip emerged with Liam’s beer. Just as he was handing it across, the mobile phone in his back pocket rang. He checked the display, said, ‘I’ll have to take this’, and went back into the cottage.

  ‘From the hospital,’ said Hilary. ‘I’ll put money on it. He’ll have to go back tonight. And our plans to drive up to town tomorrow morning, stopping on the way for a leisurely pub lunch … will go the way of many other such plans.’

  Her tone was wry rather than angry. Hilary and Philip knew each other very well. And accepted each other’s vagaries. Whatever romantic aspirations Liam Burgess might have had towards her, he wouldn’t get any encouragement.

  ‘So, Liam,’ I asked, ‘how did you come to hitch up with Hilary?’

  ‘Like I said, I want to study criminology.’

  ‘But you’re currently studying law.’

  ‘Yes. Nottingham only does criminology as a postgraduate degree. But I thought, if I could fit in some work experience with someone who is actually involved in that world … it’d stand me in good stead for the future. I sent my CV to lots of people. Hilary’s the only one who responded.’

  ‘There’s always some research stuff I need doing,’ she said. ‘Liam’s very quick and helpful.’

  ‘Is he involved in your work at Gradewell?’

  ‘Obviously not the one-to-one interviewing stuff.’

  ‘I just wondered. Since he’s down here.’

  ‘Invited him down for the weekend, that’s all. He’s organizing the files on my laptop which, I have to confess, are in complete chaos.’

  I thought, knowing Hilary’s love of being in control, that was unlikely. But maybe her definition of chaos differed from mine. She always had higher standards than me. I also thought that her casually inviting Liam down for the weekend was another example of her misjudging a young man’s likely responses.

  Philip emerged from the cottage, loading documents into a briefcase. His wife’s analysis was spot on. He had been summoned back for an emergency at the hospital. And immediately his body language expressed increased enthusiasm.

  After he’d gone, the three of us continued chatting for a while, but it wasn’t a very relaxed conversation. The one subject Hilary and I really wanted to talk about, the corpse I had found on the Hargood Estate, was off limits with Liam present.

  And he didn’t add a lot. He wasn’t exactly evasive, but uncommunicative when I asked about his life. Maybe it was just his age, but I got the impression he had difficulty in concentrating on anything that wasn’t Hilary.

  And she chattered on, her talk uncharacte‌ristically small, serenely unaware of his devotion.

  Some half an hour after Philip had left, I too was on my way, using the excuse of a large lunch to counter Hilary’s offers of more food.

  Ben wasn’t back when I got home. Stifling a pang of anxiety, I poured myself a large Merlot. No worries about the breathalyser now. And, finally, I settled down to read The Observer.

  It wasn’t on the main pages, which were as usual full of the idiocies of world leaders and our own politicians. Just a small report towards the back. News of a murder in Portsmouth. And, at the top of the column, a photograph of the victim’s face.

  It was someone I recognized.

  SIX

  ‘Kerry Tallis,’ Gervaise echoed my words when I went to see him on the Monday morning. The name of the murder victim.

  ‘That’s right. You remember her, Dodge?’

  I should explain ‘Dodge’. The nickname came up fairly early in our relationship. When I started SpaceWoman, I very soon realized that I was going to need someone reliable with his or her own transport to remove large amounts of clutter. Not only remove but find the appropriate place to dump or recycle the stuff. I had some unsatisfactory experiences with people who advertised themselves as ‘a man with a van’ – and one particularly incompetent operator who had the nerve to call himself ‘a gentleman with a van’. His definition of a ‘gentleman’ proved to be, particularly in the close quarters of a cluttered bedroom, rather different from my own.

  Finally, on the verge of giving up, I found a listing in a local freesheet, which read: ‘TREASURES UPON EARTH – All of your rubbish has a value to someone.’ There was a mobile number and, intrigued by the wording of the ad, I immediately rang it.

  I’d been anticipating something fairly rough, but the voice which answered was even posher than that of the useless ‘gentleman with a van’. Posh but slightly evasive. He identified himself as ‘Gervaise’ and asked how he could help.

  We bonded immediately by voice on the phone, and I fixed to go and see him later that day. His instructions were very precise. To find his house, I had to turn off up a narrow farm track outside Barnham, in the direction of the nearby village of Walberton. I was to follow that as far as it went and he’d be looking out for me.

  The turning would have been easy to miss if I hadn’t been given such detailed instructions. The hedgerows either side of the track were overgrown, but the hard-packed earth in the parallel tyre-tracks showed regular use.

  The trail ended at a broad entrance whose gate had been fixed open so lon
g that weeds and brambles had grown up around it. There was a house, probably four-bedroomed, in dull red-brick, and a couple of outhouses with corrugated iron roofs. Everything was tidy, but unadorned.

  The place had the air of a farm or smallholding, but there were no signs of cultivated crops or livestock. The space in front of the house was dominated by a pale blue drop-side truck which was clearly old but had been extremely carefully looked after. Raised outlines on the driver’s side door showed where the logo of some former owner had been painted over.

  (I later discovered from Dodge that the van was in fact a 1951 Morris Commercial CV9/40 Tipper. He told me that before he knew me well enough to realize how little interest the details of motorized transport held for me. But he did confirm something I’d suspected, that he’d done all of the refurbishment and maintenance on the vehicle himself.)

  That first afternoon, I didn’t put my sharp-proof gloves on before getting out of the Yeti. This was, after all, an introductory call rather than one that would involve actual decluttering. I walked towards the front door of the house but, before I got there, Gervaise had emerged from one of the outbuildings.

  He was a tall man, the curly brown hair and beard giving way to grey. The much-washed sweatshirt and chinos had settled into an anonymous beige. He wore battered black boots, whose scuffing showed the steel toecaps beneath.

  ‘Hello,’ he said, stretching out a large hand, but not making eye contact. He looked down at the ground. ‘Welcome to my planet.’

  ‘You must be Gervaise,’ I said, shaking the proffered hand.

  ‘And if you’re not Ellen,’ he said, ‘the law of coincidence is being overstretched.’ Another person would have acknowledged the joking element in his words, but Gervaise didn’t. His eyes were still fixed on the ground. He stood awkwardly, slightly swaying for a long moment, then asked, ‘Would you like a cup of something?’

  Rather than gesturing towards the house, he indicated the outbuilding from which he’d just emerged. ‘This is the bit I live in,’ he said.

  The space into which he ushered me, still without any attempt at eye contact, was possibly the most minimalist I had ever seen. The interior walls and ceiling were clad with planks of wood, old floorboards liberated from skips, he later told me. And he’d put a lot of insulation between them and the building’s original walls.

  There was a single bed along one side, made up with neatly squared-off sheets and blankets. Beside it stood a wooden office filing cabinet and a narrow bookcase containing about thirty jacketless hardbacks. The battered table and single chair suggested that Gervaise didn’t entertain much. And most of the wall opposite the bed was filled by a cast-iron cooking range, much older than either the building it was in or the adjacent house. A battered array of non-matching saucepans littered the top. A tin kettle, which must have been put on in anticipation of my arrival, whistled insistently.

  ‘I drink nettle tea,’ said Gervaise, moving towards the range. ‘All right? There’s nothing else.’

  I had never tried it but, keen to start our encounter on the right note, said that would be fine. Dodge took two mismatched mugs from the small cupboard over the stove and prepared the drinks with practised ease.

  Sorry, still haven’t explained why I called him ‘Dodge’. The fact is that, in the literature of hoarding, there is a mental condition that keeps coming up called ‘Diogenes syndrome’. Which is extremely unfair to the person it’s named after. Diogenes of Sinope was an Athenian philosopher, said to have spent his life in a large ceramic jar. He made a virtue of non-consumerist minimalism, so there’s no justice in the fact that his name has been used to describe a condition whose sufferers do the exact opposite. Diogenes syndrome, also known as ‘senile squalor syndrome’, is applied to old people who self-neglect and hoard compulsively.

  When I first saw the Spartan minimalism in which Gervaise lived, I made a comparison with Diogenes. It was just the kind of idea that appealed to his quirkily educated mind, and he encouraged me to slip into the habit of calling him ‘Diogenes’. It didn’t take long for that to be shortened to ‘Dodge’.

  I had enormous respect for him, as one of the few genuine men of principle I know. I’ve met many people over the years who talk about their principles, but very few who have actually put them into action with the dedication that Dodge has. He was brought up in well-cushioned middle-class circumstances by parents who sent him to private school. He studied economics and management at Leeds University, and started out well on the career path at an investment bank in the City of London.

  I tell this like a continuous narrative, but the information that makes it up was gleaned in many years of talking to Dodge. He is reticent by nature and does not like talking about himself. He never volunteers anything of his personal history, so I’ve pieced it together from his hints and my own instincts.

  What I do know is that something happened in his late twenties that made him completely re-evaluate his life. From minimal clues I have deduced that this might have taken the form of a mental breakdown, which might have coincided with the end of a relationship. Whatever it was, it put him out of commission – possibly hospitalized, I don’t know – for the best part of a year. And he emerged from the experience a changed person.

  The new Gervaise left behind the rampant consumerism of the City and moved to his current home in West Sussex. Whether he bought the house and outbuildings with money he’d saved, or with an inheritance from his parents, I don’t know, and probably never will. But from things he’s said on the subject of mortgages, I’m sure he hasn’t got one of those. I’ve no idea whether he has any savings left either, but if he does, he never touches them. Knowing Dodge, I’d be surprised if he believes in having any excess money and gives any that comes in to charity. But I’m speculating there.

  The lifestyle he embraced in West Sussex made him perfect for my SpaceWoman purposes. Dodge’s great concern was waste. Though he doesn’t ally himself to any organization like the Green Party, he is very clear in his own, slightly idiosyncratic beliefs. He was appalled by the throwaway culture of the consumerist world, and he wanted to make a personal challenge to it by his lifestyle. He spends his days out in his 1951 Morris Commercial CV9/40 Tipper, collecting the detritus of human life wherever he finds it. He then devotes enormous effort and ingenuity to seeing whether he could find some means of recycling what he’s collected. Something has to be totally degraded and rotten for Dodge to find no use for it. And he feels a pang of guilt for every item that has to be consigned to the dump.

  He stows his collections inside the main house. When I first went in there, I thought Dodge himself might be a candidate for hoarding therapy, but soon recognized the meticulous attention with which the piles of garbage were organized. He knew where every single item was and had plans for each one of them. The other corrugated iron-roofed outbuilding was his workshop, where he spent most of his time repairing, reshaping and finding new uses for society’s rejects.

  The electric and electronic equipment which people jettison with such abandon when the next update becomes available, Dodge salvages and refurbishes. Knowing they have more years of useful life, he gives them to the offices of charities.

  Other items he assembles from available materials. He’s very inventive, particularly with furniture. He’s made tables and bookshelves from discarded and broken wooden pallets. His garden chairs are particularly distinctive, structured from pallet wood sanded to silk, their seats woven not from wickerwork but from nylon rope, blue or orange, salvaged from the south coast shoreline. No two are alike, and Dodge’s craftsmanship makes them very desirable artefacts.

  But he sells very few. Most of them he gives to care homes or individual pensioners to brighten up their patches of garden. He doesn’t like talking about money, but over time I got the impression he only sold his works when he was really up against it.

  From stray hints in what he’s said to me over time, I’ve got the impression that he does some work for a c
harity, though I’ve never found out the details of that. If he does do it, then I’m sure he’s unpaid. The breakdown – or break in his life – had left him very wary of the commercial world.

  From the start, though, I established that one of the ground rules for our working relationship, if it was going to develop at all, was that I would pay him. Previous experiences with charities had taught me the dangers of basing any kind of business dealing on goodwill alone. At first, Dodge didn’t like the idea, but when I made it clear that was the only basis on which I would work with him, he came round. We agreed an hourly rate (and I kept checking what other people charged for similar services to ensure that his payment level kept up).

  From my point of view, our relationship works fine, and I like to think Dodge regards me as a friend. But I’m still not sure what goes on inside his head. Over the nearly eight years we’ve worked together, he still hasn’t once looked me in the eye. And I sometimes get complaints from clients, from whose homes he has removed stuff, that he’s ‘surly’, ‘dour’ or ‘uncommunicative’. Other people, I know, have been put off straight away by his telephone manner and not pursued their enquiries into employing him. (When I first made contact, I must have caught him on a good day.) And even more were probably put off by the ‘TREASURES UPON EARTH’ listing and didn’t even get as far as lifting up the phone.

  Anyway, that’s what Dodge is like. I have a lot of time for him. I know he is a good man, if a troubled one. And one who is wary of social contact.

  I’ve never found out for certain what made him this way, but I’ve a feeling it had something to do with the relationship that ended round the time of his breakdown. I’m fairly sure it was with a woman rather than a man, but what she did to traumatize him so much, I will never know. He hasn’t had any romantic attachments since, and perhaps his self-imposed monasticism is a kind of damage-limitation exercise. I have spent a lot of time with Dodge alone in enclosed spaces and there has never been any sexual element to our proximity. He doesn’t appear to have any close friends, either. Except for me and, as I say, I’m never really sure of my status in his thinking.